As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine is about poetry and catastrophe, violence and relief work, artistic literature and documentation, injury and care. The lens through which I discuss these topics is the Jewish concept of “hefker,” originating in property law, where it refers to objects that are ownerless and up for grabs. I explore the multivalence of the hefker concept as a legal, poetic, existential, and political/social term, showing how Yiddish poets, Russian language authors, aid workers, and medical professionals—all responding to the pogroms of the Russian Civil War—used the term hefker to describe and conceptualize the experience of mass public violence. To declare a population or individual beyond the realm of law, to act with abandon, to abandon an object, to abandon your ego–these are some of the ways the term evolved. The talk will examine instances of abandonment in documents, newspapers, and artistic literature in Yiddish.

Harriet Murav is a Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita in the Departments of Comparative and World Literature and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The author of six monographs, five co-edited books, and articles on Russian and Yiddish literature and culture from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, Murav has also co-translated David Bergelson’s Judgment (2017) and a selection of Yiddish and Russian stories, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Together with Gennady Estraikh, she co-edited a volume of essays on the Yiddish poet David Hofshteyn, forthcoming in 2026. Her new project, Living Out of Time, focuses on the theme of time, waiting, and wartime in contemporary Ukrainian poetry.